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Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

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Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#31

Post by zabzonk »

jdrc wrote: post #8
zabzonk wrote: post #3

The whole thrust behind this article is that grading and testing is a bunch of crap. And that's entirely correct, IMHO. We should restructure our whole Western (and Eastern, for all I know) education system on the lines of Ivan Illich's book Deschooling Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society which (simplified) suggests that everyone gets an educational grant that they can spend about which and who…

That's putting the cart before the horse, people need teaching to learn how to spend, trial and error is the slowest learning strategy and should only be used when there are no alternatives

> trial and error is the slowest learning strategy

But that's what they do now! I can't see any alternative to that, but people could be given an increased range of learning possibilities.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#32

Post by swayvil »

sturgill wrote: post #24
warner25 wrote: post #10

I've often thought the same thing about becoming an adult, especially a parent, in general. There are so many choices that I harshly judged older people for making (how to allocate their time and money, where to live, what to allow or not allow the kids to do, how to behave at work, etc.) that I now find myself making as a married guy in my mid-30s with four kids. It makes me sad, but on each point I'm like, "Oh, now…

I frequently say that 16 y/o Chris would be very disappointed in 40 y/o Chris. But 16 y/o Chris was an idiot. As you touched on, the fun twist is when you abstract the learning so it’s not just “I was wrong about X” but “I should be much more accepting of contrarian views.”

Larry Niven. Protector.

Human eats mutagenic yam. Among various changes, it greatly augments intelligence.

The first thought of a Protector, just awakened from his mutative trance, is, "Wow, I have been really really dumb".

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#33

Post by matthewdgreen »

endisneigh wrote: post #7

This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem. Interviewing, school, job performance, etc. etc. If there were an organization that could "perfectly" evaluate people's skills in a fixed period of time it would quickly become the top, and eventually only company. It would use its own skills in order to remove low performers, perfectly fr…

The first thing to understand is that the goal in teaching is not to evaluate anyone's skills. The goal in teaching is to make sure that students learn things. From a teacher's perspective, the evaluation part is entirely a hack to make sure that they do.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#34

Post by Lascaille »

jjj123 wrote: post #25
beebmam wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good! Students should be failing out of they're unwilling to work hard

You could call it unwilling to work hard. Or it could be difficulty prioritizing work, or ADHD, or disorganization. Are those traits what we’re testing for, or are we testing for knowledge of the subject?

The testing is for a combination of knowledge of the subject and ability to apply it in practice.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#35

Post by kaycebasques »

Tangential: The article mentions Chesterton's Fence. I clicked the link to learn what that means and didn't find it (it's just a link to the guy's Wikipedia page). But check out the beautiful signature of this Chesterton fellow!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#/media/File...

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#36

Post by yodsanklai »

Daneel_ wrote: post #16

For the most part I actually had wonderful teachers during my school career. What I bitterly disagreed with was a lot of the curriculum, and I knew they didn’t have a say in that. So my question to educators here would be: Do you ever feel like you’re forced to teach topics you know won’t benefit students?

> Do you ever feel like you’re forced to teach topics you know won’t benefit students?

Normally, professors teach things they have some expertise in, and they're biased to think that this is useful to students.

Besides, it's often very debatable whether something is useful or not. For instance, I used to teach things such as theory of computation, automata theory, and similar so-called theoretical classes. You could debate ad nauseam whether this benefits students or not. Some would argue it's useless and students should do more javascript labs, other think that these are the foundations of our field, unlike the latest JS framework which will be obsolete in 2 years.

Some of my colleagues go to great length to convince students that the class they teach is useful, but I'm not convinced this is necessary. I've noticed that students are happy as long as they think they learn something from the class, and that the class is neither too hard or too easy. They don't question the utility of the class if the teacher manages to make the topic fun. For instance, labs, exercices, exams, should be of gradual difficulty, so each student feels they can make progress. This is challenging to achieve when the class audience is heterogenous.

So rather then the choice of topic, what had happened to me was that I disagreed with the way the topic was taught. In my university, sometimes we would work in team with little saying on the class syllabus, labs, exams... This can be frustrating and I'd just leave the team.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#37

Post by jessriedel »

endisneigh wrote: post #7

This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem. Interviewing, school, job performance, etc. etc. If there were an organization that could "perfectly" evaluate people's skills in a fixed period of time it would quickly become the top, and eventually only company. It would use its own skills in order to remove low performers, perfectly fr…

> This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem.

You're not engaging with author's argument. The author explicitly assumes for the sake of argument that perfect evaluation is possible. He's saying that even under this unrealistic assumption, teacher policies that naively look draconian are in fact hard to avoid given reasonable teacher effort.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#38

Post by mr_cyborg »

oconnor663 wrote: post #22

My teaching experience is limited, but for teaching compsci I've had good results with programmatically graded assignments, where the students get unlimited submissions but also machine-enforced deadlines. (I liked this when I was a student, and I've liked structuring my own class this way too.) One of the big benefits is that you can be maximally clear about what the problem set is asking the students to do, because…

As a student I’ve taken computer science classes with and without some kind of autograder. I’ll say that depending on how it’s set up it can be complete nightmare fuel. In one class I recall that 3/4 of my time was formatting comments correctly to not trip the chest detection that came from not “properly attributing” the code I wrote.

Also the assignments were written to the autograder. So instead of saying “write a method that does X” it would say “write a method named NAME that takes in XYZ parameters and outputs exactly in QRS format”.

After having taken so many open-ended assignment classes that really hurt my brain.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#39

Post by akvadrako »

endisneigh wrote: post #7

This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem. Interviewing, school, job performance, etc. etc. If there were an organization that could "perfectly" evaluate people's skills in a fixed period of time it would quickly become the top, and eventually only company. It would use its own skills in order to remove low performers, perfectly fr…

There is such a system in the long run, it's called the free market.

If you can consistently outperform your peers while both parties have complete information, it's a sign of having some advantage.

Free markets are never perfect locally, but on a galactic scale they are pretty close, so the superior groups and will dominate.

Re: Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate

#40

Post by jessriedel »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #33
endisneigh wrote: post #7

This problem isn't a teaching problem. Evaluating someone's skills in any respect or context is basically an intractable problem. Interviewing, school, job performance, etc. etc. If there were an organization that could "perfectly" evaluate people's skills in a fixed period of time it would quickly become the top, and eventually only company. It would use its own skills in order to remove low performers, perfectly fr…

The first thing to understand is that the goal in teaching is not to evaluate anyone's skills . The goal in teaching is to make sure that students learn things. From a teacher's perspective, the evaluation part is entirely a hack to make sure that they do.

> The first thing to understand is that the goal in teaching is not to evaluate anyone's skills. The goal in teaching is to make sure that students learn things.

No, both learning and certification of learning (in a way legible to 3rd parties) are real and proper goals of teaching.

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